Element N
by Qoheleth
Summary: In which Violet's full name is revealed, in all its subtle significance and poignant irony, to an (I hope) eagerly waiting world.


**Disclaimer:** A little Bird told me that I don't own _The Incredibles._

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Hardly anyone knew Violet Parr's first name. Most people, naturally enough, assumed that it was Violet; after all, when a person's always introduced herself by a certain name, and everyone around her addresses and refers to her by that name, what else would it be but her first name? Of course, there _are_ those who go by their middle names, but Violet was hardly the type for that; she might be guilty of other pretensions now and then, but passing herself off as a girl Somerset Maugham wasn't her style. So it came as a bit of a shock when, now and then, someone found out that, through a unique parental whim, she had spent her whole life doing just that.

It had been her dad's doing, originally. The idea, as with Dash, had been to give her a name that subtly suggested her powers, in place of the super-identity that it had then appeared she would never have; it had seemed harmless enough, with all the cleverer supervillains dead or retired, and he had felt strongly that his offspring's special gifts merited some such recognition. So, after having her tested to determine what powers she had, her parents had spent about an hour trying to come up with a girl's name that suggested invisibility and/or force fields. ("Is there a Slavic form of Vanessa that sounds a little more like _vanish_?…" "If she'd been a boy, we could have used Barry; her middle initial would already have been R.…" "Are you _sure_ that 'Uncine' isn't a real name? I could have sworn I read a folktale somewhere…")

It had been her mother who had hit on the solution. With the hard-nosed maternal realism that Violet had spent her life alternately chafing at and thanking God for, she had noted that one useful aspect of force-field powers in a young woman was to keep her from being assaulted and forcibly robbed of her maidenhead during some innocent evening stroll – to keep her, in other words, _inviolate_. Her father, taken with the idea, had agreed that "N. Violet" answered nicely to his requirements, and N. Violet Parr she had therefore become, her mother filling out the initial with the name of a remote cousin who had passed some years before. (Being a Southern lady of the old school, Helen Wright Parr naturally had every name in her recent family tree on call for just such an emergency.)

That part of it Violet liked. She was proud of her force-field powers – as well she might have been, given how many times they'd saved her and her family – and it was nice to think that they were a part of her name as well as her person. And the three words together had a wonderful sound to them, like some gracious and dignified lady in a parlor full of gardenias – which she would probably never be, but it was nice to imagine.

All the same, she couldn't help being glad that so few people had ever found out about her real first name. Not just because it was horribly old-fashioned – and not just because it gave her a set of initials that any reasonably clever enemy would have taken about five seconds to convert into "Non-Valuable Player". The first she didn't hugely mind, really, and the second – this was the advantage of being a girl – was purely temporary. (She'd checked about a hundred times since learning Tony's surname, and she was confident that "N.V.R." had no such weakness.)

No, the real trouble with her name was how badly it matched her actual life. As her intimates well knew, it had always been her great lament that she'd never been able to be just an ordinary girl – that the first known super born after the Act, whose father still chafed at the restrictions on his heroism, wasn't allowed to simply blend in with her surroundings, as both her temper and the nature of her super-gene made her yearn to do. She had always dreamed of attending a new school without having to memorize an elaborate cover story about why she left the last one – of picking out new carpeting for her bedroom without having to worry about whether it would catch fire if her brother ran across it at half the speed of sound – of going out with her friends for sodas without having to be careful not to laugh too hard or swallow the wrong way, lest her powers be involuntarily activated by her hiccups.

In short – as she had once so memorably snapped at her mother – she had wanted to be normal. And she knew she never would be normal. And even now, when her abnormalities had saved so many hundreds of lives, she still found it a little galling – a faint touch of tastelessness on the part of destiny – that she, of all people, should have been christened Norma Violet Parr.


End file.
